Category: Corona Virus

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Children who have had COVID-19 are not protected from Omicron variant - The Jerusalem Post

Coronavirus cases are up more than 25 percent in the United States over the past two weeksand those are just the ones we know about. Experts warn that the true size of the current outbreak could be 10, or even 14, times worse than the official counts suggest.

Take Hawaii, for example. Last week, the state reported about 900 new cases a day, but a spokesperson for Hawaiis department of health, Brooks Baehr, warned that the true number could be five, six, seven times greater. That would be an extra 4,500 to 6,500 new cases every day, Baehr told the local news channel KHON2.

What exactly is the average person supposed to do with that information? Many people know that COVID casesas shown in all those jagged charts and splotchy, color-coded maps that decorate front pagesare likely underreported right now. That uncertainty makes calculating ones own risk extra tricky. If cases could be 10 times worse than what you see on a graph, how do you know if your local outbreak is bad enough that its worth slapping your mask back on? Or, more drastically, canceling plans altogether?

Read: You are going to get COVID again and again and again

All of this uncertainty could be a bargain worth taking. Washington Secretary of Health Umair A. Shah told me that his states COVID team anticipated this data gap cropping up with the distribution of at-home tests, which arent always included in official tallies. But for Shah, giving people the tools to swab themselves outweighed concerns about losing track of the data. If Im going to try to trade off, whats better? For me to know all the numbers or for me to have people empowered to make good decisions? I would trade off to make sure people are empowered to make good decisions.

The gap between reported and actual cases is probably as much of an undercount as weve ever had during the pandemic, Jason Salemi, an associate epidemiology professor at the University of South Florida College of Public Health, told me. The state of Washington doesnt attempt to predict the gap between real and reported cases, Shah told me. We feel that whatever [estimate] we come up with is likely not going to be accurate. Because when you dont know, you dont know, right?

Salemi cited three big reasons for the size of the fissure this spring: first, the increased availability of at-home tests; second, a decline in testing overall; and third, the mix of viral conditionsor the fact that variants thought to cause less-severe disease are circulating around a country thats already got a good amount of immunity thanks to vaccination and infection. The last combo can lead to fewer people coming down with symptoms, which may make them less likely to get tested, he said.

At-home tests offer a kind of pandemic-tracking catch-22. While such tests have afforded Americans more visibility into their own dance with the virus, they also make measuring the pandemics movement from afar challenging: A positive result in ones living room doesnt always work its way into the official count. (The CDC does not require such results to be reported, but strongly encourages that people let their health-care provider know. Some test makers, states, and counties offer options for self-reporting ones results.) In a perfect world, obviously, we need to figure out ways to make sure that these at-home antigen tests, those results are making their way into the official numbers, Salemi told me. But it is way more important that people are taking advantage of the at-home antigen tests and utilizing them to make decisions in how to interact with their community.

So should Americans just throw out case-level data entirely? Experts told me that the numbers do still have some use, even if theyre less illuminating than before: monitoring the direction of the pandemicparticularly if used in combination with other metrics that arent affected by testing volume or the popularity of at-home tests.

Read: What COVID hospitalization numbers are missing

They pointed me toward several alternatives, including hospitalizations, the number of people on ventilators, the number of patients in the ICU, deaths, and wastewater data, as well as keeping tabs on what variants are circulating. If I had a cockpit with all those gauges, I would look at all that, Shah told me, though he stressed that hed prefer that members of the community focus more on taking action than on datathat is, masking up and getting boosters over refreshing charts.

If you are frequently monitoring the data, maybe consider your cadence. I asked Salemi if people who are very worried about COVID should really be checking four or five pandemic metrics daily. I think youre doing yourself a big disservice if youre looking at these numbers every single day, because there are reporting anomalies and things that change, he said.

Tara Kirk Sell, of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that shes personally watching COVID case numbers mostly to understand trends and assumes theyre undercounted. I dont worry too much that I dont know exactly what the level is since a lot more people are getting sick right now is close enough for personal decision making, she told me over email.

Elizabeth Carlton, an associate professor at the Colorado School of Public Health, suggests starting with the CDCs community-levels map, which assigns counties colors using a combination of three metrics (one of which is cases). Green is low, yellow is medium, and red is high. If your county is in the red, then no more data-sleuthing needed,she wrote in an emailstart wearing a mask indoors. If its yellow, a simple approach is to round up. As for green: Personally, I have been treating green as low-risk and, in that case, rarely wear masks in public unless its really crowded. That said, I dont have an immune-compromised household member and at least one person in my household already had a SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Another option would be to forgo charts overall, and mine your social network for clues. If youre hearing your friends and your co-workers get sick, that means your risk is up and that means you probably need to be testing and masking, Samuel Scarpino, the vice president of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundations Pandemic Prevention Institute, told The New York Times earlier this year.

And of course, you can always put to use the very thing thats contributing to the chaos: Just last week, the Biden administration made a third round of free at-home tests available to Americans. While they may not sharpen our collective understanding of the pandemic, they can at least provide individuals with a bit of controlsomething thats been hard to come by amid two years of upheaval.

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Coronavirus Cases Are Being Undercounted. What Should You Do? - The Atlantic

As the US marks Memorial Day weekend and the unofficial start of summer, the seven-day average for COVID-19 cases in the U.S. are more than six times what they were a year ago.

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center showed a seven-day average of 119,725 cases as of Saturday. That figure held at 17,887 cases on May 28 of last year.

Despite the rising infection rate, COVID-related deaths were down from last year, a sign of increased immunity through vaccines and prior infections, along with wider availability of treatments.

The seven-day average of 470 deaths reported on Friday marked a decrease from 637 on the same day last year.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said that about 54 percent of the U.S. population is experiencing lowCOVID-19 community levels, though some areas are seeing medium and high levels.

But the more than fivefold increase in infections comes as health experts have warned Americans to exercise caution ahead of a possible surge.

Almost a month ago, Deborah Birx, a leading member of the Trump administrations White House coronavirus task force, said that Americans should be preparing right now for a potential surge in this summer across the southern United States.

Bill Gates has warned that it is possible that the worst of this pandemic has not yet occurred, pressing for more investments needed to prevent a future pandemic.

Were still at risk of this pandemic generating a variant that would be even more transmissive and even more fatal, he said. Its not likely, I dont want to be a voice of doom and gloom, but its way above a 5 percent risk that this pandemic, we havent even seen the worst of it.

Still, current COVID-19 case numbers are well below peaks this winter, when the highly transmissible omicron variant contributed to a widespread uptick in inflections.

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As summer begins, US COVID-19 cases six times higher than last year - The Hill

By this time, we already know about COVID and its long term effects. We also know about the various common signs and symptoms COVID; however there are certain symptoms which are so unusual that it is beyond anyone's knowledge to associate it with COVID.

These unusual symptoms are an indication that COVID is not just a respiratory illness, it is far more worse than that. In the aftermath of a coronavirus attack, 10-20% of the patients (as per the estimates of the World Health Organisation) are likely to develop long term complications which usually start 2-3 months after the infection and mostly linger for a few months.

As per a research study, "Long COVID is a term used to describe presence of various symptoms, even weeks or months after acquiring SARS-CoV-2 infection irrespective of the viral status. It is also called post-COVID syndrome. It can be continuous or relapsing and remitting in nature. There can be the persistence of one or more symptoms of acute COVID, or appearance of new symptoms."

The super effective way to deal with long COVID conditions is to understand the symptoms, both common and uncommon ones.

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Coronavirus: Unusual symptoms of long COVID everyone should know - Times of India

Study by researchers of Keck School of Medicine of USC and Kaiser Permanente Southern California finds link between exposure to airborne particulate matter and increased risk of serious coronavirus complications

By Jeremy Deutchman

Downtown Los Angeles covered in a layer of smog. (Photo iStock)

Data from a new USC study shows a significant increase in the risk of severe outcomes for COVID-19 patients exposed to fine particles (PM2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), two common (and correlated) components of ambient air pollution in Southern California. Produced by ground and air traffic, industrial burning and other sources, these air pollutants can exacerbate the effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus over both the short and long term.

Our research demonstrated that one-year average exposure to PM2.5 translated to a 20-30 percent increase in the risk of hospitalization, intensive respiratory support and ICU admissions from COVID-19. Exposure to NO2 for one month carried an increased risk of 12-18 percent, said Zhanghua Chen, assistant professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and co-first author of the study. We also saw that long-term PM2.5 exposure was associated with a higher risk of mortality from COVID-19.

The study appears in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Researchers collaborated with Kaiser Permanente Southern California (KPSC) to examine a cohort of more than 74,000 COVID-19 patients diagnosed from March to August 2020. With detailed residential address history linked to Kaiser Permanente members electronic medical records (EMR), investigators were able to accurately predict exposure history for specific pollutants.

Individual-level results

Earlier in the pandemic, a number of studies using national data in ecological analyses found a link between long-term air pollution exposure and increased COVID-19 incidence and mortality. However, this approach raised important questions and concerns.

Ecological analyses are subject to a lot of biases, and it wasnt clear whether the findings could be applied beyond the community level, Chen said. In our population cohort study, we were able to leverage the sophistication of EMR to create a well-defined classification of the severity of COVID-19 outcomes tied to air pollution exposure at the individual level.

The results were clear, noted coauthor and Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences Frank Gilliland, MD, PhD. Our study demonstrates that breathing clean air may reduce the severity of the infection. When someone is infected, reducing their exposure to air pollutants maybe beneficial, as it may decrease the risk for poor outcomes and also has many other health benefits.

A compelling cohort

In addition to providing individual-level results, utilizing the Kaiser Permanente cohort for the study conferred other benefits as well. Kaiser Permanente has enriched patient background information also known as covariates encompassing factors including race, ethnicity, sex and socioeconomic status, which enabled us to adjust for social demographics and comorbidities like diabetes, obesity and asthma, said corresponding author Anny Xiang, PhD, MS, a senior research scientist at KPSCs Department of Research & Evaluation. Also, whereas other studies were more focused on older populations, which are more susceptible to COVID-19, ours has a much broader representation of age range because Kaiser Permanente covers such a large percentage of Southern California residents.

Based on their findings, Chen and her colleagues now plan to examine intervention approaches such as using air purifiers to reduce individual levels of PM2.5 exposure. Were starting some crossover clinical trials to investigate these types of strategies on a personal level, to see whether they can help reduce cardiometabolic disease risk, she said.

About the Study

Additional authors of the study include Brian Huang, Sandrah Eckel, Roya Gheissari and Duncan Thomas from Keck School of Medicine; Margo Sidell, Ting Chow, and Mayra Martinez from Kaiser Permanente Southern California; and Fred Lurmann from Sonoma Technology, Inc.

The study was supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (3R01ES029963-01) and the Keck School of Medicine Department of Population and Public Health Sciences COVID-19 Pandemic Research Center at USC.

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Exposure to air pollution can worsen patient outcomes from COVID-19 | Keck School of Medicine of USC - University of Southern California

BOULDER, Colo. Boulder and Jackson counties in Colorado have been designated as having high rates of COVID-19 transmission by the Centers for Disease Control.

Heading into the holiday weekend, some health experts are warning that increased travel could cause cases to spike further, as they continue to rise across the country.

The CDC recommends communities with high rates of the virus wear masks indoors as well as on public transportation. It also recommends everyone who is able to get vaccinated and boosted, and be tested for COVID-19 if they experience symptoms.

This update from the public health agency comes as crowds flock to Boulder for both the Boulder Creek Festival and the BOLDERBoulder 10k race over Memorial Day weekend. While a few chose to mask up even during their outdoor activities Saturday, the vast majority did not.

I feel like weve been cooped up for a really long time, said Rachel Klopper, who was visiting Boulder from Denver. I mean, obviously you still need to be safebe vaccinated, wear masks indoors. But, being outdoors now in the open air, and being able to interact with other people without being terrified and being able to see summerits really lovely.

CDC data shows the current case rate in Boulder county is nearly 319 per 100,000 people; but, even with cases trending in the wrong direction across the country, we are still far below reported levels seen in the winter during the omicron surge.

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CDC: Boulder and Jackson counties showing high rates of COVID transmission - Denver 7 Colorado News

Maine is the first state to see at least 30 percent of its eligible population receive a second COVID-19 booster shot, according to Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Maine once again lives up to our Dirigo motto, Shah tweeted Friday, noting that the state leads the nation in second booster shots with a rate of 30.5 percent of those eligible.

Adults 50 years and older, and people who are immunocompromised, may receive a second booster, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Of Maines 1.34 million population, 74.23 percent have been fully vaccinated, and 756,933 doses of booster shots had been administered as of Saturday, according to the Maine CDC. The tally of booster doses does not break down how many people have been boosted, or whether they got first or second booster shots.

Meanwhile Sunday, the Maine CDC reported 162 people were hospitalized with the coronavirus. Of those, 20 were in critical care units and three on ventilators. Thats an improvement from Saturday, when 166 people were in hospitals statewide with the virus.

The state reported 475 new cases of COVID-19 Saturday, compared to 510 new cases on Friday. The true number of infections is underreported because many people who take at-home tests do not report results.

Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said of those who are in indoor settings with large numbers of people without masks, there is a good likelihood you will suffer a breakthrough infection, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.

In Maine, with most counties now categorized by the U.S. CDC as being at medium or high risk of coronavirus transmission, if youre in a group of 25 people, it is likely that one of them is positive for COVID, said Dr. Dora Anne Mills, the chief health improvement officer for MaineHealth and former head of the Maine CDC.

If youre fully boosted, relatively healthy and not elderly, even if you contract COVID, the chances are it will be mild, though its hard to know what your chances are of contracting long haul COVID, Mills said Sunday in an email.

If someone wants to go to a movie or an indoor concert, Mills recommends being fully boosted, wearing a high-quality mask and sitting where the ventilation is better. She also recommends having a plan for how to access treatment if infected. The risk for severe COVID-19 illness goes up steadily from age 40 and over, and much more precipitously from age 65 and up, she said.

Personally, Mills said she would go to the movies with conditions.

I feel fine to go to the movies, but while the COVID incidence is still high, Im choosing show times that are less crowded, and Im wearing a high-quality mask, sitting away from others, and of course making sure Im up (on) my vaccinations, Mills said.

Since the pandemic began, Maine has recorded 262,572 cases of the virus and 2,346 deaths. The state typically does not report additional deaths and cases on Sundays and Mondays.

The death toll reported on Friday was one higher than Saturday. The reason is the state lowered the death toll by one after the Maine CDC reviewed and validated information submitted to the agency, Robert Long of the Maine CDC said Sunday in an email. One death previously reported as a COVID-related death did not meet the criteria to be classified as such, Long said.

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Maine leads the nation in second COVID-19 booster shots, Shah says - Press Herald

Gov. Hutchinson opens up about how he led the state through the pandemic and what happened behind closed doors as he worked with world leaders to combat COVID-19.

ARKANSAS, USA In December 2019, the World Health Organization's (WHO) China office was alerted to several unknown origin pneumonia cases centered in Wuhan's seafood wholesale market.

At the time it didn't have a name, but it was the start of a deadly pandemic we now know as COVID-19.

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson says he remembers being briefed on what was happening overseas.

"We had numerous calls with the White House, with other governors, helping to get prepared and helping to know how to respond to it," he said. "You knew that it was likely to come to Arkansas so you are trying to get prepared for it and nobody can really understand the gravity, the drama that was ahead for us."

According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), the first laboratory case of COVID-19 was confirmed in the U.S. on January 20, 2020.

"It was actually shocking to see how quickly it spread in Washington state and how it hit the nursing homes. It was challenging in terms of hospital care, so it was alarm bells going off at that time," Hutchinson said of watching cases enter the U.S.

On March 11, 2020, Arkansas confirmed its first presumptive positive case. At the time, Gov. Hutchinson revealed the case came out of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

"We had planned that when the first case hit that I would declare an emergency so we could put the resources needed to respond to it," he said.

Gov. Hutchinson says securing PPE was a challenge during a global shortage.

"It was unbelievable for me to be on the phone with our suppliers and saying we need to reserve factory time. I never thought I would have to do that as a Governor," he said. "And then being told we are being outbid by New York."

During the pandemic, the governor issued a directive to close indoor dining at restaurants. Later it extended to closing gyms, barbershops and salons for example.

"I remember the pressure even from the Trump Whitehouse to shelter in place, to close businesses. I resisted that in Arkansas, he explained. "It didn't make sense and so we didn't go down that path of saying, 'some businesses are essential, and some are non-essential.'"

The governor said all businesses are essential and he wanted to keep as many open as possible.

Closing school campuses in the spring of 2020 wouldn't last long. By the fall, virtual learning would be offered but many children headed back into the classroom.

"I was getting letters from female volleyball students saying, 'it's my senior year, please don't cancel our year.' The pressure was there because then you had some teachers protesting out in front of the mansion saying, 'you're going to put us in a coffin if you make us have school.' So, that was a lot of pressure," Gov. Hutchinson said.

5NEWS asked the governor if he has any regrets about how he handled the pandemic?

"One of the regrets is some of the confusing messages that were out there, and that science was disregarded," he explained. "Whenever you look at the skepticism over some of the vaccines, it just really surprised me. It was what we had been waiting for. All of a sudden, skepticism came in and they questioned that and conspiracy theories. I would have liked to have greater acceptance of that."

Hutchinson is term-limited and has served two four-year terms as governor and cannot run again.

5NEWS asked the governor what comes next? He said he is thinking about a run for president but did not say when he might decide on whether to enter the race.

As of May 27, 2022, Arkansas reported a total of 842,439 cases of COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. 3,763 Arkansans have lost their lives to the virus in the past two years.

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Arkansas governor reflects on past coronavirus pandemic response - KFSM 5Newsonline

According to the CDC, a majority of Americans have been infected by COVID-19 based on the antibodies showing up in their blood. Scientists can distinguish between COVID-19 antibodies that came from a previous infection and ones that came from the vaccine.

While many Americans have never tested positive, based on the antibodies, the CDC has determined that approximately 58% of Americans have been infected over the last two years. That number went up from 34% at the end of last year, which means that most Americans got infected during the Omicron surge.

Despite the high numbers, there are still many Americans who have never been infected by the coronavirus.

"I still think there are a lot of people who have perhaps been fortunate enough or privileged enough to be able to shelter themselves for the past two years who could very well still get it. Where they take a different approach to living their lives," said Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, with Brown University's School of Public Health.

Now, scientists are trying to look at those who have never been infected to find out if there is something beyond luck and taking the right precautions, that make some people seemingly immune from getting infected.

"One of the things that should be looked at is whether people who were sort of in the same place, they had the same type of exposure, but some may have gotten it and some may have not and trying to understand what makes the ones who didnt get it, different," Nuzzo said.

Scientists at Rockefeller University in New York are currently studying that. Nuzzo says it's important to study these people because it could give scientists information about how to potentially prevent people from getting infected from the future, or possibly how to treat future variants of the virus.

"There was a hypothesis that some people may express a different level of the receptors, the types of cells that the virus tries to invade and that people with more of those may be more likely to be infected than people with fewer of those," she said.

As of right now, there have not been any conclusions regarding natural immunity from the coronavirus. Medical experts recommend continuing to take the proper precautions to prevent yourself from getting infected.

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Scientists Research People Who Have Never Been Infected By COVID-19 - NBC San Diego

There were 3,092 new, confirmed cases of COVID in Massachusetts Wednesday and 12 new deaths, bringing the total number of lives claimed by the coronavirus to 19,404, according to the state Department of Public Health.

There also were 795 people hospitalized with COVID, and 79 people in intensive care units. Twenty-nine were intubated, that is, had a tube inserted into their trachea for ventilation.

The White House announced more steps to make the antiviral treatment Paxlovid more accessible across the U.S. as it projects COVID-19 infections will continue to spread over the summer travel season.

The nations first federally backed test-to-treat site is opening Thursday in Rhode Island, providing patients with immediate access to the drug once they test positive. More federally supported sites are set to open in the coming weeks in Massachusetts and New York City, both hit by a marked rise in infections.

Next week, the U.S. will send authorized federal prescribers to several Minnesota-run testing sites, turning them into test-to-treat locations. Federal regulators have also sent clearer guidance to physicians to help them determine how to manage Paxlovids interactions with other drugs, with an eye toward helping prescribers find ways to get the life-saving medication to more patients.

Despite a nationwide surge in COVID-19 cases, deaths from the virus have remained largely stable over the past eight weeks, as vaccine booster shots and widely accessible treatments have helped to delink infections and mortality.

Confirmed infections in the U.S. have quadrupled since late March, from about 25,000 a day to more than 105,000 daily now. But deaths, which have tended to lag infections by three to four weeks over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, have declined steadily and are now plateaued at fewer than 300 per day.

Its the first time in the course of the pandemic that the two have not trended together, said White House COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha. He called it an important development in helping Americans get back to normal life.

The Associated Press contributes to this report.

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In Massachusetts, new COVID-19 cases top 3,000 and 12 new deaths - Boston Herald